To write is to put yourself in war against a blank page, against your own self, adjacent to your belief, your orgasm fantasies, your being a man or a woman. When you write, you lose your sexuality and rediscover yourself. It is of losing what is not there. You lose the emptiness in you and you put in words not necessarily to form poetry or memoir. You write without necessarily knowing what you are writing and what writing is really all about. The process will let you know what writing is; who is the persona in you writing it; who you are and where your writing would bring you.

I chose Poetry because I thought it was the easiest genre. It can be short, but it can’t be easy at all. There was no easy way or short way or right way. There is only try. You tried to incorporate your life experiences together with your imagination into the lines of poetry.

Poetry needed to be born. You needed to be pregnant with words. You have to have sex with your mind. You have to have sex with yourself. You have to have sex with words. You craved for Sylvia Plath and Kate Choppin in the middle of the night. And when you had them inside your mouth, you feed them to the hungry little poetry inside your womb, inside your mind, in-side of you. You have eaten too much of them. You vomit; it’s not called morning sickness because you are not really pregnant. You just hoped you are. You just imagined being pregnant. You vomit everything on top of the paper. “Its not poetry”, your critic said. It’s still not poetry. Nothing was left in your stomach; remember that you vomited Sylvia Plath and Kate Choppin. Nothing was left inside your stomach; remember that there was really nothing in it. Nothing creative. Nothing poetic. But you kept on vomiting words. Words on the paper. Words on your table, on your floor. Words like these. Words like these.

What really is Poetry? “Poetry gud, kanang nay rhyme-rhyme, poetry na”, being exposed to elementary and high school publication, we have had pseudo poems published by proud pseudo writers. These poems spoke of young love all the time, being drunk with too much emotion, forgetting and failing home works. That was poetry. Not until I read Poetics in CL 121. By then I knew that there should be a certain distance between the work of art. We called it aesthetic distance. Poetry is not always all about strong emotions on top of the paper. It is not always all about unrequited love or juvenile shit. It can be about a cup of coffee, a cigarette butt, a fly buzzing around you. What is important is how the fluidity of your language transcends into a startling insight. Catharsis must be there, but catharsis can only be achieved if we see something that is both recognizable and distant. And for that, I hated to talk about poetry. I hated to write what I thought was poetry. And for that, I failed de Ungria’s Poetry 2. Writing this preface is having is too much courage to defend a thesis of poetry without retaking a failed poetry class. Not knowing what lies ahead.

I wanted to abort poetry ideas in my mind. If only cortal tablets can abort the desire to write poetry, I would probably overdose myself. Part of my journey in writing is the intimidation to write. I was intimidated by my own writing, and so, as always, I would end up abandoning what I thought was poetry. Words may have failed me, but I still had them. As with any emotion that feels unspeakable, I turned to poetry.

Monday, February 15, 2010

A LIST TO FALSE IDEAL

She never used the TV as a baby sitter
but she turned it on
then she co-watched Baby Einstein,
narrating for her child in the silences.
She gave up on feeling sexy—
her body was her child’s, so were possessions:
the squeezy feel of a chubby bottom,
and the silky softness of the baby’s head.
She slept with her child (because she read that
It extended quality time to “interact” with the baby even in sleep)
Beyond her back pain and sleep-deprivation delirium,
she felt the sweet glow of virtue.
She bought the Phonics Bus and read
Big Book of Colors, Shapes and Numbers.
She breastfed for at least a year
if she worked, she pumped milk:
seated on the lid of the toilet
humiliating noises rising from her stall while her friends ate lunch
because she believed that her milk would cost six additional IQ points.
She never split domestic tasks with him—
not because he couldn’t, exactly,
or he wouldn’t, exactly,
but because, just because
men and women are different that way.
And that is okay.
Because she needs to be ideal.
Like a poet aiming to be poetic
And ending up with just list of words.
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